Tell Me Lies

by Carola Lovering

  “Shh. Yeah. In January.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I’m starting to realize it was a mistake.”

  “A mistake? How do you accidentally sign a lease?”

  “Why are you mad about this?” I asked, though I knew. I shouldn’t have asked.

  “I’m not mad. I just can’t believe you’re talking shit about a girl you willingly moved in with.”

  “You know what?” I whispered, annoyed. “People do make mistakes, okay? I’m in law school, broke as shit, and Alice’s grandfather is letting us live in his empty apartment for chump change. I thought it was the right thing to do, but it wasn’t. Throw me a fucking bone.”

  I could see the glare on her face even in the near dark. She lay back down and pulled the covers over her, turning away from me.

  “I’m sorry, Luce. I’m just tired.”

  “You’re right, though,” she said quietly. “You can live wherever you want. I don’t know why I was surprised.”

  God I hate when girls are passive-aggressive, which they are constantly. It always requires some kind of emotional coddling.

  “Lucy, want to know the truth? When you left New York to come back here, I was crushed. But I couldn’t have done the distance. Not with work, not with the LSATs. Then I met Alice and we fell into this relationship. Just because I met her . . . it wasn’t the end of us. You and me, I mean. It was never supposed to be the end of us.”

  “You always talk about things as if it’s all a matter of convenience.”

  Pearl-colored moonlight shone through the window. I sensed the onset of dawn lurking behind the gray darkness.

  “Are you seeing that guy?” I asked. “The one at the condo today?”

  “Yeah. I doubt he’ll talk to me after this, though.”

  “You could just lie.”

  “Why? ’Cause that’s what you do?”

  “Come on, Lucy. I just want you to be happy.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  “Why do you want to fuck me so badly? What’s the point?”

  “Why’d you fuck me? Why’d you spend the whole night with me instead of with your boyfriend? You didn’t have to do that.”

  “You are such an asshole.”

  We weren’t even whispering anymore. She started climbing out of the bed, but I pressed her shoulders down.

  “I’m sorry, Luce. I shouldn’t have said that, I’m just panicked. I miss you. I don’t know what to do.”

  “You talk about it like she doesn’t exist.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m just not in love with her. Come on, I don’t want to fight.”

  Lucy stopped trying to wriggle out of my grip.

  “Stephen.”

  “Are you gonna move back to New York?” I asked her. “After graduation?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know? What about journalism school?”

  “I didn’t apply. I wouldn’t have gotten in, anyway. I barely took any journalism courses.”

  “I thought it was your minor?”

  “I fucked up my minor.”

  “Oh.”

  “Jackie wants me to move to LA with her.”

  “Don’t move to LA.”

  “Why?”

  “Aren’t you sick of California by now? Besides, LA doesn’t suit you. You’re a New Yorker.”

  “Maybe LA suits me better.”

  “No way.”

  “New York isn’t out of the question.”

  “Good. I need you to come back, Luce.”

  “Why? So I can be your slutty mistress when your live-in girlfriend is off doing errands?”

  “I’m moving out of there by June, whether or not you come back. I’ve already decided.”

  She was quiet for a moment. “For real, Stephen?”

  “Yes. And I don’t want her the way I want you. You could never be my slutty mistress.” I swept my eyes down and studied her naked body, the curves of her breasts. “Your boobs have gotten bigger.”

  “A little, yeah.”

  “I like it.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds?”

  “Yes, Stephen DeMarco?”

  “You mean a lot to me. Don’t forget it.” I traced my fingers along her spine. I could feel how tired we both were.

  “You mean a lot to me, too,” she whispered. “More than you know.”

  Somewhere in the stirring dawn, midconversation, we fell asleep.

  PART

  FOUR

  39

  LUCY

  AUGUST 2017

  I haven’t been to enough weddings to know whether I’m the kind of person who cries at weddings, but there are tears in my eyes as I watch Bree, calm and collected, in the moments before she walks down the aisle. The sun is shining streams of light through the church windows and it’s a perfect summer day, not a cloud in the bluebird sky. I watch Pippa, the maid of honor, carefully smooth Bree’s veil and train around her feet. Bree smiles at us and nods.

  Bree and Evan chose to have Pachelbel’s Canon in D play during the processional instead of “Here Comes the Bride.” It is so much more beautiful and classic; the delicate melody of the piano and violins creates a pure, holy sound that fills the nave of the church. The bridesmaids pair off with the groomsmen and begin the walk down the aisle. I’m the second to last, before Pippa and the best man. Evan’s only groomsman from Baird, Charlie Rosen, is my partner for the processional, and he hooks his elbow in mine like we’d practiced. The butterflies in my stomach whirl like crazy. I know he’s out there.

  I turn back to Bree one last time. “You look perfect,” I say.

  “We’re up, Lucy.” Charlie tugs my arm and my lilac satin dress suddenly feels too tight, but I take a deep breath and put one foot forward. Pachelbel floods my eardrums as we proceed down the aisle. Slow and steady, slow and steady. My whole body feels numb and hot, even though the church is air-conditioned, and I keep my eyes straight ahead at Evan and the priest and the rest of the wedding party. The aisle feels much, much longer than it did during the rehearsal.

  Charlie and I part ways at the altar and I take my place standing next to Jackie before allowing myself to look out at the audience. There are 250 people packed into the church, but I only see one, and I see him right away because he’s the one person looking straight at me, his emerald gaze unwavering. He sits close to the front, in the fourth row, and there is a girl next to him who I recognize immediately because I’ve looked at her Facebook pictures countless times, and I’ve cried in front of those pictures and I still look at those pictures—infrequently, but I do. I recognize her heart-shaped face and wispy bangs and broad shoulders, and one of her hands is resting on his leg, and before I can even begin to wonder why she is here when no one else was allowed to bring a plus-one, she lifts her other hand to shield a yawn and I see the diamond on her left ring finger, glinting in a narrow beam of light.

  I feel gutted, like I have so many times before involving him, stunned in a way that makes my legs want to collapse underneath me. Except I can’t let my legs collapse because in this moment I am a bridesmaid on the altar at the wedding of one of my best friends, and Bree’s father is walking her down the aisle and I have to hold it together. Because if there’s one thing I’ve come to understand over the past few years, it’s that life is a lot bigger than my individual issues, and there is something selfish about indulging in your own problems, especially on a day like today that is 100 percent about Bree. Still, I’m grateful when Jackie takes my hand and squeezes it, because she sees the ring, too, and she sees that even though everybody else has turned to watch the bride, Stephen is still looking straight at me.

  * * *

  After graduation I moved back to New York because I couldn’t not. Because the words I need you to come back, Luce and It was never supposed to be the end of us played on repeat in my head every second of every day.

  “I really wis
h you’d stay in Cali with us,” Jackie said as she watched me pack. She sat on the edge of my bare mattress with her hair tied back by an old red bandanna, one she’d bought in town freshman year before the Wild West party. The sight of the bandanna—the memory of that night, so long ago now—made my eyes well with tears. Jackie was moving to LA with Pippa in a week. Bree already had a job in New York City and if I got one soon enough, we were going to move in together.

  “I’ll just see how the summer goes,” I said. “If I don’t get a job by August, maybe I’ll move back out here.” It was half true.

  “It’s because of him, isn’t it?” Jackie blinked at me.

  “What do you mean?”

  “ ’Cause of Stephen. You think it’s going to work out. You think he’s going to leave his girlfriend and the two of you will live happily ever after.”

  Jackie’s reproaches never failed to sting, but I was used to them. Her bitterness toward me wasn’t constant but it was residual, a lingering effect of my having slept with Stephen in Big Bear Lake. Pippa was more understanding—“chemistry is annoying, it happens”—but even though Jackie claimed to be over it I knew she couldn’t stand what I’d done. Initially she said she was upset because I’d betrayed Billy—I’d told him the truth about sneaking off with Stephen in Big Bear, and I didn’t object or fight back when he told me, rather rationally, that he no longer wanted anything to do with me.

  Still, I knew Jackie was angry at me and I knew it was about more than just Billy, and I’d pressed her, until one night she caved.

  “I just can’t believe you’d give up everything you worked so hard to move past. Everything your therapist said . . . all that stuff you agreed with. How can you not see it? You think he’s going to make you happy, but he’s not. Players only love you when they’re playing. Stevie knows best, right?”

  “He isn’t the reason I was depressed, Jack,” I told her. “Depression is a chemical imbalance. It’s genetic.”

  “You don’t understand what I’m trying to say,” Jackie had muttered. “It’s pointless. You’re just going to have to figure it out for yourself.”

  I didn’t talk to her about Stephen after that, didn’t tell her about our conversation in bed the night of Paper Diamond or that we’d been talking ever since, or that he begged me to send him naked pictures because he wasn’t turned on by Alice, or that he’d promised to end it with Alice and move out of their apartment by the end of June. But I could tell Jackie knew what I was up to; she knew when I stared at my phone for too long, smiling at something on the screen. The thing she didn’t understand was that Stephen and I had had terrible timing at Baird. There wasn’t any reason that under the right circumstances, things wouldn’t be great. What we had wasn’t some trivial flirtation that could be summed up in a Fleetwood Mac lyric. But I didn’t bother explaining that to Jackie, because a lot of times people on the outside of situations can’t understand anything.

  I flew back east and applied to every job under the sun. A job in New York was my ticket to an apartment in New York, and an apartment in New York was my ticket to Stephen—well, closer to Stephen. Bree had had her position at J.P. Morgan lined up since the previous summer, but my parents were adamant that I couldn’t look for an apartment with her until I found a job. We’re not going to fund your life while you skitter around Manhattan, Lucy, were CJ’s exact words as my dad sat there nodding, because agreeing with CJ was all he knew how to do.

  My dad said his friend at the New York Times could probably get me a last-minute internship, but unpaid, so I declined. Holding out for a job in journalism—the career my parents assumed I still wanted—wasn’t worth it. I didn’t really care what I did, so long as it was semirelevant to my major and paid enough for me to fund my own life in the city. I just wanted to get hired as quickly as possible, so I cast my net wide, drafting endless cover letters and tailoring my résumé accordingly.

  Of course it was CJ who ended up landing me a job, because of course it was CJ who knew the trendy, Botoxed women who had connections at English degree–populated conglomerates like Edelman and Hearst and Condé Nast.

  “Francesca can get you an interview at a company called The Suitest,” CJ told me, examining her champagne pink nails, freshly manicured. Francesca was CJ’s most Botoxed Pilates student. She came to the house for private classes. Her lips looked like they’d been injected with Jell-O.

  “It’s some kind of online publication that covers hotels,” CJ went on. “And Francesca’s ex-ex-husband Harry is the director of sales. So the job is ad sales but it’s the travel industry, so I figured you might be interested. I bet you’d get it—Francesca knows how smart you are, and she and Harry are on fabulous terms, despite the fact that she caught him having an affair with his male personal trainer.”

  Francesca’s ex-ex-husband Harry hired me after a twenty-minute interview during which we mostly discussed Francesca’s use of injectables—particularly the current state of her bottom lip—in keeled-over laughter. An HR person informed me that my title was account coordinator and that my annual salary would be $32,000. Lydia told me that was almost less than minimum wage, but I accepted the job anyway, because who knew if I’d ever get another job offer, and the sooner I got a job the sooner I could move to the city.

  That weekend, Bree and I found a reasonably priced apartment on Third Street in the East Village. We signed a lease to move in the middle of June. That night, while Alice was at a work event and I was alone in my bed in Cold Spring Harbor, Stephen and I had a naked FaceTime session to celebrate.

  40

  STEPHEN

  MAY 2014

  Alice handed me a plate of steaming scrambled eggs, buttered toast, and two strips of limp, rubbery bacon. She climbed into bed next to me holding her own plate, which, as usual, contained an identical meal to mine. She rubbed her legs against my own, picked up the remote, and flicked on the television. The Big Lebowski flashed on the screen, one of my favorites. But Alice quickly changed the channel, surfing through until she landed on one of her beloved reality shows, this time a rerun of The Real Housewives of New Jersey. A woman with brown hair yapped at a woman with blond hair, and then the blonde yapped back at the brunette.

  The eggs were watery and bland; they were a struggle to swallow. Alice was not a good cook, and her attempts to be domestic were sad. I placed my unfinished plate on the floor, picked up my copy of my contracts hornbook, debated shooting myself, and then began chapter fourteen.

  “Oh, you’re going to read?” Alice looked over at me and chewed a piece of bacon between her teeth, which I noticed she hadn’t bothered to brush.

  “Maybe I just don’t want to eat breakfast in bed this morning. Okay?” I felt like being a dick. I wasn’t sure why.

  “Do whatever you want.” She glanced back toward the TV.

  I felt the stirrings of yet another fight.

  “Look, Al, I have an exam on Friday. Maybe I’ll just go to the library now and get a jump start on studying.”

  She shrugged and kept her eyes glued to the blabbing girls on the screen. “Suit yourself.”

  “The eggs were good.”

  “You didn’t even eat them.”

  I wondered how she knew that without having peeled her eyes from the television.

  I stood and brought my plate over to our pea-size kitchen, which was two feet from the bedroom, and dumped the uneaten food into the trash bin. I would get a roast beef sandwich at my favorite deli on the way to NYU.

  “What are you going to do today?” I asked Alice in an effort to be friendly.

  She shrugged, still not looking at me. She wore my old Baird College T-shirt, which was soft and frayed at the edges from so many washes. Her hair was tied up in a messy bun and loose blond wisps sprinkled her neck. For a second I wondered if I should go over and try to fuck her before I left, but decided it wasn’t worth it.

  “Maybe clean the apartment,” she said eventually. “And I’ll buy groceries for the week. What do you
want for dinner tonight?”

  I wished Alice would go out and spend a Sunday with her friends, go to brunch or have some Bloody Marys at the Frying Pan. But all she ever did these days was wait for me, like a faithful dog.

  “What time will you be home?” she asked, not waiting for me to answer her about what I wanted for dinner.

  “I don’t know. It might be late.” I didn’t have any plans, but I could always make some. If I didn’t stay late at the library I would probably grab a beer with some classmates—anything to delay the return to the apartment.

  “Okay, so what time do you think?”

  “Don’t worry about dinner for me tonight, okay, Al?”

  “Fine,” she snapped, and I knew she was pissed again. She was always pissed about one thing or another, just like Diana, actually. She shoveled a bite of egg into her mouth.

  “By the way, when’s our lease up again, Al?” I asked warily. “July first, right?”

  “What lease?”

  “For our apartment.”

  “This is my grandfather’s apartment. We didn’t sign a lease. Why?” She shot me a threatening look.

  “I thought I signed something. Wasn’t it six months?”

  “That wasn’t a lease. It was an agreement to pay him a specific amount on a monthly basis.”

  “Oh.”

  “Why?” Alice’s dark eyes narrowed.

  “I just didn’t know if we were supposed to re-sign,” I lied.

  “No,” she said, turning back toward the television. “There’s no time frame. He owns this place.”

  This dump, I wanted to say.

  I knew she was annoyed at me but I didn’t have it in me to try and patch things up right then, so I said goodbye. The usual relief of leaving my apartment filled me as I walked down our shitty Kips Bay block toward the subway, but it was only temporary respite. The words no time frame made my throat feel very tight and dry. I couldn’t place precisely when I had gone from adoring Alice to feeling trapped and irritated by nearly every wavelength of her existence.